A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop Read Online Free PDF Page B

Parton portraying June Cleaver.
    While her conservative neighbors clipped coupons for weekly trips to the local grocery stores, Susan, suddenly with a positive checkbook balance, phoned in orders to the convenience store a mile from her house. The prices were inflated, the selection limited, yet it offered what Susan deemed a great advantage, home delivery—for an additional fee.
    “We were all flabbergasted,” clucks one neighbor. “Couldn’t she get in the car and drive to Kroger?”
    While others jogged for their health, Susan chainsmoked, a cigarette continually dangling between her long, thin fingers. Ron White tended to keep to himself, but Susan, who often said she’d never met a stranger who didn’t become a friend, disdained the cordial-but-distant doctrine. It wasn’t unusual for her to corner a neighbor who was out to pick up the mail, or to rap on a door asking to borrow bread for Jason’s lunch. More often than not, she was attired, not in the typical suburban uniform of khaki slacks and cotton shirt, but in a too-tight T-shirt and shorts cut high enough to showcase her legs.
    As her neighbors exchanged chin-wags about the odd new woman on the block, Susan appeared unaware of her growing notoriety. She crowed to Gloria about the friends she’d made in Houston, emphasizing how nicely they all treated her. Yet perhaps in the quiet moments when alone, not worried about impressing family or friends, Susan felt very differently, the daughter of sharecroppers adrift in an upper-middle-class world.
    The only neighbors to truly befriend Susan were Tom and Lorene Roy, a retired petroleum engineer and his wife, who lived directly across the street. The Roys’ house, a white two-story with wrought-iron trim, recalled their Louisiana roots, a shared heritage that made them believe they’d found a kindred soul in Susan.
    “At first, she struck me as a real upright lady. She had this husky voice and a Louisiana accent,” recalls Tom Roy, a large man who favors worn coveralls for the endless puttering he indulges in around the house. “When she was really dressed up, she looked gorgeous. But I believe it would be fair to say that she threw it around a little bit, too. She was looking for attention. Ron? I think he wanted to give her that attention, but he was never able to find the way to do it.”
    When Tom Roy happened upon Susan in the front yard or getting in or out of the car in the driveway, they teased each other, laughing good-naturedly.
    “You and me are going to go upstairs someday,” Roy said with a quick wink.
    “I’m going to tell your wife,” Susan answered with a coy smile.
    “Go ahead,” he challenged, knowing his wife understood he was just “cutting up like an old man will do.”
    Most women in the neighborhood worked, and Susan was no exception. She’d lost her nurse’s license after the forged-prescription incident in Baton Rouge, so with the help of Jean Morris, the agent who sold them the Valley Bend house, Susan enrolled in real-estate school and signed on with a nearby Century 21 office. In her mustard-colored blazer, she showed houses and took prospective buyers on house-hunting expeditions. She was relatively good at it, and working brought in the commissions she now needed to pay for Jason’s expenses.
    If the neighborhood women shunned her company, Jean and others at the office became her new friends. After work they stopped for drinks and talked over the happenings of the day. Spread among her marriage, work, the country club, and friends, Susan’s days were hectic, and now that she had Jason, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. In the best of circumstances, adjusting an adolescent to a new state, city, and home witha mother he’d rarely seen and a stepfather he barely knew would have been difficult. With a mother distracted by the demands of a new marriage, the situation spelled disaster.
    Acutely aware of her dilemma, Susan told friends she felt like she was in